“War is returning to the territory of Russia,” warned Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky on Sunday, July 30th, after Ukraine launched drone attacks against Russian targets.
Russia announced on Sunday it had repelled two separate drone attacks overnight. In the annexed territory of Crimea, 25 Ukrainian drones were destroyed, or neutralised, by Russian forces. No casualties were reported. Three drones were downed in Moscow, two of those were “suppressed by electronic warfare” and smashed into an office complex. A security guard was injured.
In recent months several drones have hit the Russian capital. A drone also hit an internal affairs building in the Bryansk region in Western Russia on Monday morning, with no casualties, according to news reports.
“Gradually, war is returning to the territory of Russia, to its symbolic centres and military bases, and this is an inevitable, natural and absolutely just process,” commented Volodymyr Zelensky.
Former Russian President Dmitry Medvedev, however, warned of the consequences of a more serious attack on Russia. Medvedev, who is deputy chairman of Russia’s Security Council, said,
Imagine if the offensive, which is backed by NATO, was a success and they tore off a part of our land, then we would be forced to use a nuclear weapon according to the rules of a decree from the president of Russia.
He said that Moscow’s enemies should pray for Russia’s success in the region—referring to Kyiv’s counter-offensive against Russian forces in the southeastern parts of Ukraine—otherwise Moscow would simply have “no other option.” According to Russia’s nuclear doctrine, nuclear weapons can be used in retaliation when the existence of the Russian state is threatened.
This is not the first time that the politician has warned Western leaders of the possibility of inciting a nuclear war with Russia. President Vladimir Putin announced last month that Russia had moved a first batch of tactical nuclear weapons to its ally, Belarus, claiming they were placed there for deterrence. Russia has previously sent nuclear-capable Iskander missiles to Kaliningrad, its exclave located between NATO members Poland and Lithuania, but Western observers have questioned whether it actually has nuclear weapons stationed there. Meanwhile, six bases in five NATO member countries, Belgium, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, and Turkey, host U.S. tactical nuclear weapons. The UK and France have their own nuclear forces and no longer host American weapons.
Regarding conventional weapons, no major changes have occurred on the battlefield. Kyiv says its forces are making some progress in their drive to retake territory, albeit at a slower pace than desired. Ukrainian Deputy Defence Minister Hanna Maliar said advances were limited by entrenched Russian positions and mines. Vladimir Putin said on Saturday that Ukraine had lost large amounts of military equipment in the past two months.
The war has been dragging on for almost one and a half years, since Russia invaded Ukraine last February and, according to an analysis by the Center for Strategic and International Studies, the current situation paints a bleak picture for the future, with the end of the war nowhere in sight. “It is a war that may come grimly close to a modernized version of World War I or Stalingrad,” they assess.
The most probable outcome is a war of attrition that has no clear outcome or time limit. It is a war where both sides fight a long series of relatively static battles with high levels of attrition while they increasingly dig in along the entire front, using drones and missiles to attack each other.
As the analysis points out,
grim as the prospect may be, the United States needs to work with NATO and its strategic partners to accept the possible need for a long war between Ukraine and Russia, a failure to achieve an end to the war that allows Ukraine to regain the all the territory it has lost in the fighting since 2021, and the need for years more of military and economic aid.
